Yair . . . I nerp on a bit about the scale of land clearing that has been done in Australia . . . whether that is good or bad depends on your point of view. If anyone is interested and has a few minutes it may be interesting to put "Surat Qld Australia" into Google Earth and have a look around. What you will see is sixteen-inch rainfall grazing country with a little bit of cultivation. The remnant vegetation is obvious and all the clear country has been chained and in most cases stick-raked. If you scroll about at a level of reasonable resolution you will see the patterns of the pulling tractors and in places windrows of stacked timber. . . and even windrows of ashes. You will also notice lots of stock watering dams and cleared fence lines, all done by dozer . . . you can imagine the frustration of folks running machinery in this country when there fancy piece of modern gear starts showing fault codes . . . this is no country for electronics. Cheers.
chinese via california?
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That is something I think about here in the states a lot, when I am driving on the interstate I look at the massive amounts of material that were moved to get the grade right. Entire hills moved and put into valleys to make a smooth grade. Schools, hospitals, municipal buildings that have big parking lots carved right into the hillside. It must have been an amazing sight in this country following WW2 when all this stuff was being constructed simultaneously. A lot of it must have been done with old open cab cable blade machines. Or if you want to go back one more step in land clearing think about how almost everything east of the Mississippi was clear-cut by hand with crosscut saws and axes. At one point white tail deer were almost extinct due to habitat destruction. They had black and white pictures of the town I live in during the oil boom in the late 1800’s. Pretty amazing to see the hills around here without as much as a single stick of wood on them.
Yeah . . . gusbratz . I think about such stuff too. One of the looming problems with regards the productivity of the landscape is the fact that trees and scrub keep regenerating and it takes constant maintenance, mechanical or chemical, to stay on top of regrowth. With the costs of oil and the returns from livestock as they are it is becoming problematical as to the viability of maintaining this altered landscape. In the years to come most of this country could well revert back to thicker than what it was . . . at the moment it looks like maybe half a million 'out of spec.' cattle are going to be shot in western Queensland because they are not worth feeding or trucking out of the drought areas. Cheers.
It's different everywhere, but the same, too. I always like the idea of doing more with less. Around here we grow brush that burns like gasoline. Don't let the green color fool you. Trouble is, the land has been purchased by people who want to "keep it natural" and to them that means doing nothing with it but letting the brush grow wild. IMO the smart thing would be to fence it off and rent it to neighboring ranches for cattle grazing; of course at this point you would have to bulldoze or burn it and seed it with grass first because it is so far gone. But once it is being grazed properly, the cows keep the brush in check much better. http://goo.gl/maps/7cMsX But take a look at this map I made of near here. Directly south of point "A" you can see the rectangular area that has been in cattle production since the 1800s, as well as about one mile to the WSW, there is an even more obvious patch. The yellow is dry grass which is kind of like standing hay in the field and the dots are small trees and bushes; the solid dark green is brush that is twice as tall as you or I and is just waiting to burn people out of house and home.
Yeah . . . That's interesting Birken Vogt . . . there is not much evidence of 'dozers working in that landscape! What is that vegetation and what would be the rainfall? I see a couple of nice clear flowing streams in the area. Cheers.
http://goo.gl/maps/tIjki Here is a good shot of where the road cuts through the vegetation that is typical of what you find out in those brush fields. You can't walk through this stuff so it's hard to know the full extent of it. The vegetation is manzanita brush, some stuff called Scotch broom which is between brush and herbaceous, and various other types of brush that all burn like a nuclear bomb. There are pines and oaks thrown in also. Rainfall is 40-80" and it all falls between November and April for the most part and by June we may see zero rain until the fall again, and temperatures get up near 100F.
Thanks to all for great information!